A New Social Network Launched This Week

What happened

Meta launched Threads on Wednesday evening, a text-based network built on top of Instagram.

Signups passed ten million within hours and tens of millions within the first day, which is the fastest start any network has had.

Unlike the announcements of the spring, this one is available here rather than in two countries you do not live in.

It is not available in the European Union, for regulatory reasons, which is a reversal of the usual pattern.

What it is at launch

• Text posts, with images.
• Built on Instagram: that account is required.
• Your Instagram handle carries over.
• Mobile only, with no web version.
• No hashtags, no keyword search, no messages.
• No advertising yet.

The third is genuinely useful for anybody who already holds their name on Instagram, since it means nobody else can take it here.

The one thing worth knowing before signing up

Which has been widely reported and is easy to miss in the enthusiasm.

At launch, you cannot delete a Threads profile on its own.

Deleting it means deleting the Instagram account it is attached to, and you can only deactivate the Threads profile instead.

For a business whose Instagram presence matters, that is a real consideration rather than a technicality.

Meta has indicated this will change, and until it does, joining is a decision with a coupling attached.

If your Instagram account is important to you, that is the sentence to weigh.

Claiming the name is the low-risk move

Since it happens automatically if you already have Instagram.

Your handle is reserved by virtue of the account you already hold, which removes the usual land-grab urgency entirely.

So there is no race to enter, which is unusual for a launch of this size and is worth noticing.

Set the profile up, add the logo and a line saying where you actually are, and then post nothing at all.

That is exactly the same treatment as any other platform you do not intend to use.

A worked example

A business spent Thursday morning setting up a profile and planning a posting schedule for a network four days old.

They had two hundred followers on Instagram, no consistent posting anywhere, and eleven reviews on their listing.

The realistic question was not whether to add a sixth platform but why the first five were producing nothing.

They set the profile up, wrote one line pointing at their site, and went back to asking customers for reviews.

Six months later they had thirty more reviews and no meaningful presence on the new network, and no enquiry had ever come from it.

Which is roughly the correct outcome for most small businesses.

What a launch tells you and what it does not

Since the signup figure is being reported as though it settles something.

Tens of millions of signups measures curiosity and the size of the account base it was built on, not whether anybody stays.

The relevant question for a business is whether people are still using it in six months and whether any of them are your customers.

Neither is answerable this week, by anybody, including the people selling advice about it.

Networks with enormous launches have declined before, and so have ones with quiet ones.

Six months is the earliest anybody can say anything useful.

The Canadian context is worth knowing

Since it affects Meta platforms here specifically.

The Online News Act received royal assent last month, and Meta has said it will end news availability for Canadian users across its platforms in response.

How that plays out is genuinely unsettled and is being reported daily.

For a small business posting about its own work, this changes very little directly.

It is worth knowing as background if your posting relies on sharing local news articles, which some businesses do.

Beyond that, it is a matter to watch rather than to act on.

What to do this week

Which is very little, deliberately.

If you have Instagram and it matters to you, weigh the deletion coupling before setting up.

If you decide to, claim the profile, add a line pointing at your site, and stop.

Set a note for January to look at whether it still exists and whether anybody you know uses it.

Six months is short enough to still be early and long enough for the answer to be visible.

And spend the hour you would have spent planning content on the review request instead, which has a known return.

Where a text network could genuinely suit a trade

Worth naming, since the general advice to wait should not obscure the specific case.

Some trades explain better in words than in photographs, and a business whose value is judgement rather than finish has never had an easy fit on an image-led platform.

A plumber answering the question everybody asks, in four sentences, is well suited to a text network and poorly suited to a gallery.

That is a genuine reason to look at this one rather than a reason to rush at it.

If that describes you, the six-month wait still applies and the answer at the end of it is more likely to be yes.

The counter-case

Being early has occasionally paid.

Businesses that built audiences early on previous networks got reach that later arrivals could not buy, and that is a real historical pattern.

A text-based network also suits some trades genuinely well, particularly anybody whose expertise reads better in words than in images.

And a business already active on Instagram is carrying its audience across at almost no additional cost, which is a genuinely different position.

Weigh the Instagram coupling, claim the profile, post one line, and decide properly in January.

This week

1. Check whether Instagram matters to you.
2. Read the deletion terms before joining.
3. Claim the profile if you proceed.
4. Add a line pointing at your site.
5. Post nothing else.
6. Set a January review.
7. Ask for reviews with the time saved.

Step two is the one nobody is mentioning in the coverage, since a profile you cannot remove without removing something else is a different commitment from an ordinary signup.

The last time a Meta platform made news is covered in Facebook renamed its parent company.

Frequently asked questions

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